In his novel, The Fall, the French writer Albert Camus tells a revealing parable about two strangers walking together one night on the streets of Amsterdam. Their footsteps led them by and by to a bridge crosslng one of the many waterways that lace that city, and at the abutment of the bridge the conversation of the two is abruptly cut short. One of them stops, turns to the other, and says, "I'll leave you near this bridge. I never cross a bridge at night. It's the result of a vow. Suppose, after all, that someone should jump in the water. One of two things: either you do likewise to fish him out and, in cold weather, you run a great risk. Or you forsake him there, and suppressed dives sometimes leave one strangely aching. Good night."

Suppressed dives leave one strangely aching. Can it be that this is not only a parable of modern man in general, but that this is also a picture of the church? Can it be that Camus' poignant stranger is no stranger at all, but is one whom we know quite well? Can he be ourselves? Can it be that the church, the people of God, has in the Twentieth Century arrived at the bridge that leads from mere piety and mindless jargon and from otherworldliness, leading to relevance and involvement, but that at that crucial spot we have turned back? Can it not be that we too in the church feel often a strange aching, a longing, a desperate feeling that we are not having the influence and the relevance we ought to have; and can it not be also that that strange aching has to do with some suppressed dives? We have not dived full force into the world, with all its risks, for we might lose ourselves in the process. We are not taking the bridge, we are suppressing our instinct to plunge and help and save. And so we ache; much more, we anguish when men today wave their fists at the church and insist that Christians have nothing to say to the present crisis.